German Factors Constraining Word Order Variation

Abstract:
A corpus-based study of the order among verbal complements in a number of different factors have been linked with the linearization of complements and adjuncts in languages exhibiting a relatively free word order. The theories reach from predominantly competence-based models to explanations almost entirely based on performance assumptions. The main factors that have been proposed are: systemic (basic) order, information structure and heaviness. Additional factors that seem to have a strong influence on the order are pronominalization (pronouns before full NPs) and animacy (animate before inanimate). Three widespread types of theories are

* the configurational theories assuming a strong influence of the basic order plus semantic/ pragmatic reasons for reordering (e.g., GB, minimalism)
* the Prague School assuming information structure as the ordering principle except for the focus constituents where the systemic order prevails (Prague School)
* a performance-based theory based on length (Hawkinss EIC-"Early Immediate Constituent Principle")

Recently Hawkinss (1994) length-based theory has received much attention in general linguistics (typology), computational linguistics (modelling language evolution) and psycholinguistics (memory-based models of sentence processing). According to Hawkins, the influence of the other factors besides length can almost entirely be explained as epiphenomena of length. The claim is that all types of phrases that tend to precede their siblings, such as topic phrases, pronominal NPs, complements preceding in basic order and definite NPs are simply shorter on the average than their respective counterparts. The data presented by Hawkins himself are suggestive but much too restricted in size to permit any empirically supported conclusions.

In this paper we report on a corpus-based study involving six German verbs exhibiting different basic-order patterns (SUBJSUBJ, DOBJDOBJ). In order to prohibit the effects of other factors, we restricted the investigation to non-pronominal NPs in the middle field. Because of the low frequency of any individual verb, a corpus of 32 Mio words (ca. 1.6 Mio sentences) had to be chosen. The corpus consists of contemporary newspaper texts. For three verbs each, pairs of SUBJ-IOBJ and DOBJ-IOBJ were considered. The aim was to search for any interdependence of basic order and length and in this context to also investigate the role of definiteness. The search was to a large part automated.

Results: Hawkins's claim that the basic order is a mere epiphenomenon of length cannot be maintained. EIC is not a primary factor for the order among verbal complements. Also: contrary to Hawkinss prediction, there is no correlation between verbal position (before or after the middle field) and EIC. But there is a strong independent influence of basic order. There is also an interesting effect concerning definiteness: In addition to the expected preference definiteP>